The chestnut trees were a meeting-point because they stood on the back-side of the mountain, out of sight of the Big House but close to the slave-cabins that dotted the wooded slope. Mostly it was lovers who’d meet there, or children out on midnight expeditions to charm away warts or hunt for buried treasure. The trees were a part of the complex geography of trails and landmarks invisible to the whites, even to Tom, who was sharper than most at woodcraft. They were also the meeting-point for the kind of illicit trade that went on at every plantation, where backwoods traders would creep close to exchange rum or bird-shot or fish-hooks for such small items as could be “lifted” from the laundry or the pantry: cured tobacco-leaves, iron from the nail-factory, one of the master’s fine linen shirts. Her brother Jimmy had excelled at this: Jefferson property appropriating Jefferson property.
For an instant, seeing the tiny flames assembling by the trees, Sally wondered if Jimmy had come back. If, for all his great talk of seeking his fortune in Europe, after four years of freedom he’d come down to this: being a trader in pilfered goods.
The next instant she knew it couldn’t be so. There were too many assembling, for it to be merely a secret transaction.
A preacher?
But if a preacher had been expected, Sally knew she, or her mother, would have been told. And a preacher would have come earlier in the evening, not in this dead hour between midnight and cockcrow.
The voices were too quiet, the rhythm wrong. A single voice would murmur, barely audible under the rattle of june-beetles and cicadas in the trees. Then men would reply, and fall quickly silent. And that single voice would go on.
Sally stood like a startled animal, invisible within the shadows, until the men dispersed. Then she remained where she’d been, concealed in the thickets until she was sure every one of those men was safely in his cabin again, and not likely to see her slipping through the trees. And when she moved on, she was trembling.
She didn’t know what was going on, but she had her suspicions. And those suspicions kept her lying awake in her cabin, listening to the soft breathing of her two sleeping sons, until every bird upon the mountain started up their morning song, and the sky grew light.
When she heard the voices of the carpenters on the way up to the Big House, Sally rose and waked Young Tom. The boy was beginning his apprenticeship to David in the plantation carpentry shop. He had his father’s manual deftness, and a young man riding into some small settlement in western New York or Pennsylvania with a carpenter’s skills would always be able to make a living. Both Young Tom and his two-year-old brother Beverly had the fair skin and Caucasian features that would let them pass easily for white, no questions asked.
Little Harriet had been the same. Tom had agreed with Sally that great care would be taken, to teach the little girl proper manners and speech. When she was old enough, Harriet would leave Monticello. She would enter the home of one of the many families of French émigrés whom Tom knew in Philadelphia, to be introduced to the town as a white young lady. These days there were hundreds such, many of them Tom’s friends from his days in Paris who would be delighted to adopt and educate their distinguished friend’s “orphaned ward.”
Then one icy December morning in 1797, little Harriet had waked up crying with a sore throat and a crimson flush to her skin that faded under the pressure of a thumb, and immediately flooded back. Tom couldn’t linger, if he was to reach the capital in time to open Congress—he was Vice President to Mr. Adams by that time, and fighting to keep the United States from being completely reabsorbed by the political power of England. Not long after his departure, Harriet died.
Knowing that Bev played with Jenny’s children, Sally scooped her younger son out of his cot while Young Tom was washing, carried him to the light of the door. As she’d feared, he looked flushed and feverish, and complained that his throat hurt. She put the toddler back to bed and poked up the fire, filled the kettle with water for a willow-bark tisane, struggling to keep the panic out of her heart. Everyone had been sick in the quarters, that winter Harriet had taken the fever. The little girl’s health had never been good, even before she took sick.
Sally stopped at her mother’s cabin, and told her of Bev’s sickness, on her way up to the Big House to tidy Tom’s quarters while the family was at breakfast. Her mind was full of the boy as she climbed the hill. Tom was leaving tomorrow for Richmond for James Callendar’s trial, and as usual hadn’t even begun to pack. Callendar’s arrest under the Sedition Act, charged with speaking against the President, made her profoundly uneasy, as if she’d felt the ground shift beneath her feet.
Among the papers on Tom’s desk, she had seen a few days ago the rough-printed proof-sheets of the book for which Callendar had been arrested, The Prospect Before Us: That strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness, the pamphlet had called that ferocious red-faced little New Englander whose gruff kindness Sally still recalled with gratitude. A hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman…The reign of Mr. Adams has hitherto been one continued tempest of malignant passions…The historian…will ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature….
More than enough, she guessed, to be used as evidence of conspiracy, should the proof-sheets be found in Jefferson’s possession. Particularly with men already suspicious of Tom’s involvement in the attempts of the States to strike down the Sedition Act. Somewhere in his room, she knew, was the newly printed book itself.
Since Patsy and her family were visiting that week, Sally slipped quietly up the hill and through the tangle of scaffolding that enclosed the front of the house, to enter as usual through the cabinet’s long window. As she did so, she noticed the workmen, who should have been sliding floor-planks through the unfinished windows of what would be Mr. Jefferson’s new first-floor library, grouped quietly talking with a black man whom Sally vaguely recognized—one of Mr. Crinn’s yardmen from Charlottesville?
Before she came near enough to hear, or even to see clearly who the stranger might be, the men broke apart.
But watching the stranger stroll off down the hill to the stables, Sally saw that as soon as he thought he was out of sight of the house, he turned aside, and broke into a trot toward the woods.
Sally felt the workmen’s eyes on her, as she ducked under the scaffolding and into the house.
Because they’d been idling in talk with the stranger?
She didn’t think so.
This was something different.
Her hair prickled a little on her scalp.
The cabinet, and the bedroom beyond, were jammed with boxes, crates, trunks, and piles of books removed from the library three years ago when the roof had been torn off to alter the second floor. Tom had plans to raise a dome, like a Roman temple: Betting in the quarters on the completion-date ran all the way from next summer to the first notes of the Final Trumpet. The new library would be an extension of the cabinet, enlarging the island of privacy that was Tom’s sanctum sanctorum. Here, no one was permitted without an express invitation—except Sally herself.
Sally noted, as she entered, that the floor was filmed with construction dust and sawdust yet again; she’d been sweeping four times a day for months. Tom’s trunk and portmanteau lay beside the bed, and on top of the inevitable stack of books to be packed lay Callendar’s proof-sheets. As she removed them to the desk, the words caught her eye in the slatted light of the window jalousies: Repulsive pedant. Gross hypocrite. One of the most egregious fools upon the continent.
Was that truly what Mr. Jefferson wanted to have said, about the man who had once been his friend?
The bedroom door opened. “It’s outrageous,” said Tom, sliding his shoulders out of his coat and crossing the bedroom to the cabinet where Sally knelt before a stack of books. “Peter’s just ridden in with word from Richmond. They’re going to try Callendar befor
e Sam Chase, of all people. Why don’t they just send him to stand before Parliament in England while they’re about it? Sam Chase would have made Washington King, if he could have.”
Sally drew the printed book of The Prospect Before Us from the stack, rose to her feet, and held it out. “It’ll be easier to explain than proof-sheets, if one of the inn servants takes it into his head to see what you’ve got in your luggage.”
Tom’s eyes widened, then narrowed and turned cold: “You have a good point, I regret to say. I’ll be staying with Mr. Monroe, but that doesn’t make it less likely that we’ll be spied upon, if word gets about that I’m in town.” He laid the book down on the bed. The lines of strain that had faded during the three quiet years of his retirement were back, deeply and permanently, around his eyes and mouth.
“Will you speak on his behalf?” She kept her voice neutral: The mere thought of Callendar made her skin crawl.
Tom shook his head. “It’s unlikely I shall even show myself in the courtroom. I just don’t want to be three days’ journey away, should anything…untoward… develop at the trial.” He went to his desk, picked up the little bran-stuffed pillow he would rest his elbow on when he read, and the small iron dumbbell that he still had to use, to exercise the stiffened tendons of his right wrist. Even after thirteen years, there were nights when he could not sleep from the pain.
“Are you expecting something untoward?” Sally asked quietly.
“I don’t know.” He tucked dumbbell, pillow, and seditious book into a corner of the trunk. “Despite Mr. Adams’s orders that it disband, there is still a standing army of ten thousand men in New England. And Hamilton’s still in command of it. He’s up there now.”
“I thought that was all finished last year.”
“It is.” His voice had a grim edge. “He’s now offered to take his army and use it to conquer Mexico, so that we should have New Orleans as an American city—and so that Alex Hamilton should have a hero’s glory and a path back to power, now that Washington is gone.”
He made the motions of sorting through the books piled on the bed, but Sally could see his eyes were absent, his mind barely registering the titles, his thoughts bitter and far away.
On Mr. Adams? The friend with whom he’d worked and laughed and conversed? By whose Sedition Act Tom could very well be convicted as a traitor?
On the election in November, and his hopes to wrest control of the central government away from those who would make its rule negate the local right of each State to determine its own needs?
On the galling failure of France’s Revolution? He had been ill during the last months of the Terror in France, had barely glanced at the newspapers that spoke of bloody mob-rule and a corrupt Directorate. For three years after that, while he quietly watched the trees and the clouds on his mountaintop, the French had gulped one another down like Roman triumvirs until the last man standing had conspired to hand the country over to Bonaparte.
She remembered his face in the candlelight of the Hôtel Langeac: It is a glorious time to be alive.
Then he sighed, and shook himself out of his reverie. “Well, if they want to crush Callendar, they’ll find themselves publicly turning their backs upon the Constitution before the whole of the country. Richmond is as full as it can hold, of men from all over Virginia. Prominent men, men of property and power. If we cannot win, we can at least hold Hamilton and his party up for all to see, and force them to admit that their aim is to ignore the fundamental right of every man to say what he wishes, to print what his conscience dictates. With the election coming, it could not be better timed. I only regret that it’s Callendar who will suffer.”
“He’s dangerous,” cautioned Sally softly, and Tom looked surprised and a little hurt.
“Am I a despot, too, now, to go about distrusting my own supporters? Were I President, I would have to defend James Callendar’s Constitutional right to print about me whatever he chose. Whatever it might be,” he added more gently, smiling down into her eyes. “Mrs. Madison gave me your warning—it was you, was it not?—and I thank you for your concern for me. But Mr. Callendar, though the man is personally reprehensible, is a friend of Liberty. He will not turn against us.”
Sally heard in that phrase, friend of Liberty, the kind of self-evident magic that seemed to have such power over people’s minds, and knew better than to press the issue. In many ways, Tom had no sense at all.
“Patsy and Mr. Randolph will be here in my absence,” he went on. “Will you be all right?” Meaning, Is there anything in that area that I need to know about? Though there seldom was, and Sally was well aware that Tom didn’t really want to know.
“Thank you, yes,” she replied, as she always did.
Her sister Critta had recently said to her, with a touch of exasperation in her voice, Why don’t you just tell her you’re layin’ with Peter Carr instead of her daddy? That’s all she really wants to hear. Make your eyes all soft an’ ask, kind of breathless, “Miss Patsy, do you know when…when Mr. Carr gonna be back here next?” Critta had put on her most simpleminded expression and crooned the name of Tom’s nephew—the father of her own son and the source of innumerable trinkets and presents—with exaggerated adoration. Is that so difficult?
Sally felt her back-teeth clench at the memory. I may be a concubine, she thought, but I’m not a whore.
Instead she told Tom, “Please tell Mrs. Randolph that some of the children have come down with scarlet fever—”
Tom startled, eyes widening with concern.
“I think Bev may be sickening for it, but it doesn’t look to be bad just yet. I’m going to let Aunty Isabel know. I’ll write and let you know, how Bev goes on.”
She left him to his packing, and returned to her son, whose face was already beginning to show the flush of fever. Through the remainder of the day she had little thought to spare, either for Callendar, or for the election that had become the focus for Tom’s considerable energy for the past eighteen months, or for the curious, ambient tension that she could feel slowly coiling its way like a poisoned mist among the cabins that dotted Monticello’s hillside.
After dinner Tom slipped away from the house and came down to the quarters, to sit for a time beside Bev’s bed, holding his son’s hand and anxiously studying his face. When the children were well, Sally reflected, as she tied up bundles of herbs to dry, Tom treated them with the same friendly affection with which he treated all the children in the quarters. Plantation gossip being what it was, he could do nothing else. But Harriet’s death had shaken him, more than he would ever express. In his face tonight she saw his anxiety, and when he spoke to her—the soft-voiced commonplaces of treatment, of herbs and symptoms—she thought she heard sadness and guilt there as well.
They had been united as partners for a dozen years—as long as his marriage to Miss Patty. If the desperation of her first love for him had not survived the years, it had settled into an acceptance of him, and a deep-rooted affection.
He would never be other than he was. He would never understand the rage she’d felt, four years ago, when M’sieu Petit quietly informed her that Tom had mortgaged all his slaves to obtain money to rebuild the Big House along modern architectural principles: “I’ll be able to purchase the mortgages back within a few years, with profits from the new nail-factory,” Tom had assured her when she’d confronted him. “In any case I would not include you, or any of your family. It is only a business-man’s way of raising money. It’s done all the time.”
Did Patsy know her father had just promised her patrimony to someone else if he couldn’t pay his debts? If he broke his neck taking old Silveret over a fence some day on the mountain, Patsy and Maria would be left with nothing.
But Sally knew, that even without that mortgage, if he broke his neck some afternoon on the mountain, it would make little difference whether her family went to Tom Randolph or to some bank in Richmond. They’d all end up sold and scattered.
By the same token, Tom would
never believe that Patsy knew that he was the father of Sally’s children. He would always need to know that he stood first in Patsy’s heart—as she stood first in his. And though he was aware of the many afternoons Tom Randolph spent drinking himself quarrelsome in the Eagle Tavern in Charlottesville, was aware of the young man’s black moods and mercurial temper, he persisted in thinking well of his son-in-law, or at least saying that he did.
He was who he was. He never said he loved her and probably, she reflected wryly, never even thought of their relationship in those terms. But she knew he needed her. As much as the physical desire that was still as warm between them as ever, was his need to know, when he was away, that she would be there when he returned to his home.
He needed to know that he was loved.
He kept even yet the slim bundle of his letters to her, that he’d written on his travels to Rotterdam and The Hague. Sometimes she’d find them slipped behind a clock or under a book, hidden when Patsy interrupted him. He treasured those memories still.
He rose now from where he sat at the side of the cot, went to clasp Sally’s hands briefly—briefly, because Young Tom was there, sitting beside the hearth-fire with a copy of the Richmond Enquirer angled to the glow. Even before their own son they kept a distance, lest talk go around that couldn’t be denied. Very softly he asked, “Shall I send Ursula or Isabel down to help you tonight? He doesn’t seem badly off—”
“It’s early days yet.”
“I shall leave it to your judgment, then, Sally. As we pass through Charlottesville tomorrow I’ll ask Dr. Burns to come see Bev and Mollie. Patsy will be sending me messages—please, you write me, too.”
As they stepped outside into the darkness he kissed her: “Get some sleep if you can. I’m afraid you’ll need it.” Then he strode away up the hill toward the Big House, too preoccupied by his thoughts—of Bev? Of Alexander Hamilton’s plots and machinations? Of James Callendar? Of the election?—to whistle or sing.
Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Page 38